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Eye candy in Linux DEs can make work a good deal smoother -- resources are better shared between CPU and GPU. Plus there are some very useful effects -- expo and scale plugins (both in Kwin and compiz). Transparency can come handy too. Granted, desktop cube is there just for show as there are wobbly windows, fire or water effects.

And advanced effects don't really add that much to boot time -- I still manage to stay within 30 seconds on a rather old hardware, even with P4-class PC.

I use the desktop cube quite a bit - I keep different function on different faces - one has email, two each have all the windows necessary for two different projects I'm working on, and one is mostly spare. I admit that I could just use the four desktops like I used to with the switcher in the Gnome Panel - but now I have transparency turned all the way up, and a 360 degree picture of a sandbar in the Bahamas to look at between my windows.:) And I can kinda keep an eye on activity in windows on the other

Next generation User interfaces will need to be 3D eventually for some applications, check out taggalaxy or thebrain. Thebrain especially would benefit from decent hybridization of 2D and 3D user interfaces.

I use KDE 4 almost exclusively on a two year old machine with the desktop effects enabled and my machine does not crawl. The 3D effects of KDE 4 used to be very inefficient, but that was fixed sometime in the last year. Up until that point, I just used the simple solution of turning them off. If you don't have a relatively decent video card, then just turn the effects off. It isn't hard. KDE 3 had no built in 3D effects and certainly never made even my underpowered laptop, of the time, crawl.

For the ignorant, please explain what KDE currently uses for composting? I know on my machine it's hardware accelerated and DirectX isn't available on Linux. Doesn't that mean, by default, that they used OpenGL?

You mean like how it already it is? I read the summary as "we're going to start using a newer version of OpenGL than we use now for compositing", not "you must have an expensive video card that can handle Crysis to run KDE".

Just the need to upgrade how Kwin uses OpenGL currently to do rendering. Right now its still using the old OpenGL 1.1 - style rendering (fixed-function rendering pipeline) to a programmable one using vertex and fragment shaders. This way, it'll be easier to port it on embedded devices that uses OpenGL 2.0 by default

People will be blaming KDE for the following issues until they abandon the idea:

1. Half the Intel users will blame KDE for the kernel panics you get when using a Hello World shader with some of the Intel drivers..2. The other half of the Intel users will blame KDE that they can't use any of the items listed (frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers) because they still only support OpenGL 1.5 from 1865..3. Then there will be the Linux people complaining about it running very slowly because some software driver is used by X11 due to distribution issues with distros and proprietary drivers.4. The AMD users will probably be using some old buggy version of their driver that has buggy implementation of frame buffer objects or whatever.5. See #4 but replace AMD with Nvidia.6. Then there's the army of Linux users that do have a Nvidia or AMD card, but their card is from 1765 and therefore doesn't support OpenGL 3.0.

But besides all that OpenGL 3+ is pretty neat and you can do some fun shaders for your compositing. I wish them the best of luck!

This seems like it can only be a good thing. The major place where we're lacking (AFAIK) is in driver support, and having a major software suite such as KDE use OpenGL 3 will help the driver writers manage some of these bugs (the same way Compiz appearing on the scene majorly improved graphics drivers in Linux a few years ago).
Perhaps this will also help to push Intel to OpenGL 3 (or 4 - I mean, COME ON!).
At the same time, I have some Linux machines that don't have OpenGL 3 support (one has a GeForce 6600), so I really hope they keep functionality with OpenGL 2 for a while (that machine isn't getting upgraded - the next thing I do to it will be to replace it).

I second that... I have a Geforce 7950 GT; AFAIK, it's the "beefiest" Nvidia card available for my AGP system. It composits just fine (I'm using an RC of KDE 4.5), and I don't think a glitzy desktop is what I'd get a whole new 'puter for.

What does compositing have to do with eye candy, other than making certain kinds very easy to implement? Running a remote app over SSH the old way: change virtual desktops or cover the window and watch it slowly, painfully redraw. Running a remote app over SSH the new way: do whatever you want. When you come back to the window, it will still be exactly as you left it. I suppose not having to wait 15 seconds for a window to redraw could technically be eye candy in that it doesn't directly add new functionali

As an open-source developer I can tell you first hand, squashing bugs is boring and new features are exciting so with my limited free (and unpaid!) time I will be focusing on new features!

Tongue in cheek I hope, but sadly true for KDE. Too much time is spent making it kewl and not enough on making the desktop usable by mere mortals. KDE needs its own HIG and it needs leadership not afraid to keep the spotlight firmly on usability even if that means removing features, buttons and options from normal view t

Oh for god sakes people. Kwin provides pluggable back ends for rendering engines for compositing. Currently we support xrender and OpenGL 1.1, soon we will support the next version of OpenGL. Big deal. You can turn compositing on or off, or choose which engine is best for your platform. We will not remove the old engines or force everyone to use compositing. So stop your trolling.

I recall reading a blog post from one of the KDE architects a year or so ago bemoaning the situation that on linux/xorg KDE nearly always winds up with an non-ideal/inefficient render path. Do you happen to know if that's improved? I think xorg improvements were needed to make it great.

What would be the big deal? Unless you immediately end all support for an old version when a new one comes out, who cares? Part of the march of technology is that sometimes, old hardware gets deprecated. New software requires features and power not found on it. So you have to use the older versions, or update the hardware. Nothing wrong with this unless it is done in an abrupt or forceful manner.

I've no doubt some day KDE will jettison software rendering. It will be so rare to find a non-accelerated compute

DO care about things like "desktop works" and "can find a fast, professional theme that makes taskbar look like window title bars," neither of which is available with KDE since KDE 4 was released.

Yes, I have recently tried KDE, up to and including KDE 4.4.5 on Fedora. It continues to suck eggs. KDE 3 was professional and powerful. KDE 4 seems to have all the options I don't want, none of the options I actually used, no way to get a unified KDE/GNOME/Plasma theme (hell, you can't even get a unified kwin/plasma theme), ugly artifacting with 3D compositing off, craptacular stability and a distinct inability to remember many settings, dog-slow previews compared to Nautilus, no "compact" mode in Dolphin, either, poor dual-display support that fails to automatically handle them elegantly, and a distinct lack of KDE4-specific, complete alternate icon themes at kde-look.org to do away with the bright colors (I don't want red icons and blue icons both on my desktop at the same time; my desktop PC is not an Icee machine, it's totally unprofessional).

In short, I find KDE 4 totally considerably less usable than GNOME or KDE 3.5 and I'm fairly sure that pouring more development hours into 3D compositing is not going to make it moreso. How about just fixing the artifacting with 2D rendering? That I could actually give a damn about, though it would be one problem solved amongst many, many problems that didn't exist until KDE 4.

+1, DEAD BANG ON THE MONEY. The KDE developers suffered a collective mental breakdown and completely dropped the ball professionally by not concentrating on simple real usability. Eye candy is INFANTILE and literally USELESS. Looks like the Gnome guys are in the earlyish stages of doing the same thing. Thank God for Xfce.

KDE 3 was professional and powerful. KDE 4 seems to have all the options I don't want, none of the options I actually used,...

Yep. This was my feeling exactly. I had been using KDE since 1.1 or earlier. I've now switched to Enlightenment e-16 (very old but still being maintained). It took some work to customize but now I'm happier with e-16 than I was with KDE-3.5.10. YMMVG.

Well there is now a KDE3 fork called Trinity:
http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ [pearsoncomputing.net] - they've maintained a KDE3 repository for Ubuntu for a while now, and want to start fixing bugs and making minor enhancements in the next stage.

I've been "trying" KDE 4 for maybe a year or so. I like some things, but I hate most of them. At 4.5 it still feels like someone's abandoned alpha. Every new release brings new UI candy, yet breaks long-standing functionality or fails to address real usability problems (like that stupid desktop peanut - whose idea was that?).

What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.

Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...

It seems the KDE people have forgotten that, above all, we just want a GUI to make our lives easier. Streamline it, trim off the fat, we're Linux users for fuck's sake. People are flocking to minimalist interfaces like Fluxbox, just to get out of KDE hell.

Seconded. I've used them all, and keep coming back to KDE. SC 4.3 and previous were incredibly buggy, but 4.4.5 is a lot better and I expect 4.5 to be pretty solid. I can't live without Kate, and I much prefer Dolphin+kdesvn to Nautilus. Kontact/kdepim are not yet fully mature, but I still much prefer them to Evolution. Amarok, krfb, k3b, digiKam, ark, klipper, kopete, etc. are all as good or better than the Gnome equivalents. And this is in spite of the fact that there is very little support for KDE

I want HOW the API being used updated. Our desktops should be a perfectly rendered 3d wheat field, gently rustling on a cool summer's eve. Think Far Cry, but no game, just the desktop eye candy. This field would have a button not unlike the start button in the bottom left. It would open many very useful free and open source applications. All of your email contacts with DreamOS would be automagically merged and synced with your iphone or android. If you were at home, your phone would know to route the

I used (yes past) Linux on my Work desktop for 10 years. I always used KDE. I know it from the first version until know.

Until KDE 3, KDE really improved, but KDE 4 was a horrible start. I actually didn't start to use it until 4.2, and still it didn't have all the features for KDE 3.5. And it felt slow. Really slow. On the same machine I just suddenly had 15~20% x.org/kde cpu usage. And when I updated to 4.3 and so on it became even worse.

At the end just focus move the mouse took about 3~4s. Well, I ditched,

Rant mode ON:KDE seems exceedingly dependent on itself right now. And integration efforts (with popular apps out of KDE) are pretty much non-existent or unknown even among devs (I discovered after a friendly rant about the current "closed" state of things, that Krunner now does index Firefox bookmarks. The person who corrected me learned it by pure chance it seems, as no "user friendly media" (getting deeeeeeeeeeeep into mailing lists and all the bulk of svn commits is not user friendly, it costs more than mere minutes to check all that) reported on it at all).

I don't know who is to blame but whoever is responsible for this, is not helping the already damaged (by 4.0) reputation of KDE. Half-baked and/or mandatory apps are not helping. Neither does the silly "KDE SC" gimmick.

I can only think something in the management chain is broken, leading to absurd/rushed/experimental decisions pulled off. Either that or the exceeding majority of the 6-month release cycles is translation/bugfixing. As new features talked about during the release of "KDE 4.X" are implemented in "KDE 4.X+1" in the same state shown during the 4.X release (Look at tiled windows in the 4.5 branch. It's there, but...)Rant mode OFF

Sorry, I really needed to put that up for discussion. Whenever Akonadi is mentioned I go berserk as I am reminded of stuff like it being a requisite for the standard clock.The worst is that I am an enthusiastic KDE user and I follow development closely, trying betas and reporting bugs. I don't feel "betrayed" or anything like that, but some things are too annoying/habit breaking/RAM eating. Krunner, a Quicksilver/Kupfer-like launcher, can't be disabled and I was told by KDE people that it governs over logout functions (WHY THE LAUNCHER? why can't I just have my alternative of choice without option to take it out or disable it?).

Well, at least the project is dynamic and a good fix/decision changes for better can happen eventually.

I haven't really figure out what it's good for. When I log in it balloons me with a message that Nepomuk couldn't find redland and that my data isn't available. To fix this, a mailing list post said that I'd need some kind of soprano tool but that doesn't really work most of the time. I still have no idea really what these are, I'd just like a dot-release upgrade to succeed. I hack on stuff, but I don't want to hack on everything.

I would have to agree about Akonadi. I recently did an install of Arch Linux, and used KDE for about a week before it started annoying me more than Windows 7 does. I removed KDE and just went back to Gnome. At least there I can strip out all of the stuff I don't want to use.

Sorry, I really needed to put that up for discussion. Whenever Akonadi is mentioned I go berserk as I am reminded of stuff like it being a requisite for the standard clock.

To truly hate akonadi, you need to be logging in with $HOME on an nfs mount. And shutting down the box from time to time.

What happens is that KDE issues telinit 6 without waiting for akonadi and mysqld to terminate, which means that your nfs mount is still active at shutdown, so when the system forces the unmount the database is not coherent. Thus you get the dreaded "akonadi could not start" error on next login. Well, that's easy enough to solve by just whiffing $HOME/.local/share/akonadi -- as long as you don't have anything useful stored in there.

Which the KDE team is making harder to do all the time. Good thing the system backs up that akonadi database on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).

What with XDG (I think) now also encouraging the use of ~/.local, I fear it's only got to get worse.:(

Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).

Ah, the joys of Firefox on networked file systems.

I happen to have my work home on AFS, which has an "official" path/afs/[much longer path here]/home/angstroem -- and the localized official path/home/angstroem

He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.

In my opinion Aaron Seigo needs to go. He seems like a really nice guy and all, but he still defends the release strategy of KDE4.0 (and this despite being one of the lead devs of the -at the time- completely bug-ridden and barely functional plasma), and seems to always be at the forefront of KDE4's questionable future plans. They've reached feature parity(?) with 3.5.X. Now they need to work on stability and speed. Stability and speed. Stability and speed. The obsession with social networking integration is stupid and shortsighted. The SC naming scheme is lame. And almost as many users are now annoyed by neopomuk and akonadi as they are by that damn cashew.

He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.

He might not be wrong, but I think his attempt is doomed. Nepomuk and Akonadi are not applications, so to the user they are meaningless. However KDE4 is generating messages about them, so that's confusing at least - usually annoying, too. On top of that there seem to be no applications which actually use them in a way which would get the user interested - h

Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas.
Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him,

The worst is that I am an enthusiastic KDE user and I follow development closely, trying betas and reporting bugs. I don't feel "betrayed" or anything like that, but some things are too annoying/habit breaking/RAM eating

I wholeheartedly agree with the Akonadi & Nepomuk rant, and feel similar to you. I feel 4.5 has become waaaaaay too power hungry for not a lot in return. Frankly, aside from the few killer apps & such KDE has (K3B, Dolphin, slideshow background) I have left for LXDE (I currently run Ubuntu 10.04 minimal + LXDE testing). LXDE is lightweight, doesn't have a lot of cruft running around and is familiar - It reminds me of KDE3 & Windows Classic interfaces which I still think are probably the best don

it looks bad, is unclear and took 3 releases of kde (ha) for me to care enough to find out what sc means. and that's as a kde user, and somebody who had read about this "sc" thing before... imagine the dilution of the brand for non-users.

confused about this post ? have no idea what "sc" means ? vote against it in the next election !

You cannot expect new software to work on old hardware forever. So if you have a system with really old hardware, well then you are going to have to stick with older versions of the software. This is just the way of things.

Why not? Serious question. There are some companies and government agencies out there that still use 1960s mainframes. This idea that we should code only for new hardware is only appropriate for a certain washington based software company whose profits depend on making people buy entirely new software suites every time they upgrade their hardware.

There's not as much profit in selling a minor software upgrade that works on an older computer

As computers get more powerful, things become feasible that were not in the past. People want those features. Problem is, making software that uses them doesn't work with older systems.

That is just life. Now as for your example with mainframes, in that case someone chooses to pay for support for a system. They cost a ton to maintain. Also, you do not, in fact, get new software, just support on what you have. If you own an IBM/390, as we do, you don't get to run the new version of zOS on it. You are stuck wi

Uhhhh...dude? Currently running XP Pro on a circa 99 1.1Ghz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM. It runs fine. By the time XP Pro is EOL that box will be so old it probably won't even load web pages, so really, how long can you expect it to run, considering most folks change boxes every 5 years? Hell I doubt even Linux guys would want to keep using hardware any older, simply because web page bloat will make surfing painful on anything less.

As for your "50 year outlook" that might be fine for big iron, but for desktop

The software does what it does because the people that MADE it wanted it that way. KDE, nor any other free software, is not being made for YOU - you don't pay for it. It's being made to suit the developers and if you get some use out of it, great!

You're a user, not a customer. There is a difference. Unless you know some place that sold you KDE, and in that case you got ripped off, because you can download it right from your distro's repository like the rest of us users.

Or you could have RTFA and read that older systems will gracefully fall back to the slower implementations. The main purpose of using new OpenGL systems is performance. There's no reason why the slower methods can't be used.

Furthermore, it's also acknowledged that the free drivers won't be supporting OpenGL for another year, at least,

Surprise, there are other people thinking about backwards compatibility than you.

Now that I think about it, kde 4.x is like the hot but totally completely brainless girlfriend... Nice eyecandy, initially very pleasing and exciting, then rapidly becomes tiresome as the reality that most of your interaction occurs outside of the bedroom sets in.

Likewise, kde 4.x is very pretty and the first half hour is spent checking out all the cute/neato things it does. Horray, kmail finally keeps responding while checking mail in! Konqueror

Because i dont subscribe to upgrading just because there is new and shiny available. The old functions perfectly well, and its appalling that people code like they do today, rendering perfectably good hardware simi-functional.

Yes but you can't stick with old outdated hardware, and then whine when the software surpasses it. No one is forcing anyone to upgrade. Don't want to upgrade your hardware? Fine. Just don't expect the software world to just stop progress because you don't want to upgrade.

Oh, shut it. OS X 10.0 was barely beta quality as well, and somehow people stopped complaining when it started becoming usable, even though the upgrade to 10.2 cost money. Same with Windows Vista (6.0) --> Win7 (6.1). With KDE4, you were even warned not to use 4.0. But you still had to run off and use it, didn't you?

Yes, they did. The last 3.x release was 3.5.10, released days before 4.1.1. A good, solid and mature desktop you could use for a year while contemplating whether upgrading to the then rather usable 4.3.1 or moving to a different system. Sure, Microsoft is better at maintaining old versions of the OS. Apple is worse. Gnome's latest major version was back in 2002 or so, and I'm not going to bother with digging up the release history of 1.4, the last Gnome version I used (although I've stopped complaining abou

More like the winds of stupidity. GNOME is still designed for idiots, and the KDE developers decided that being a rock solid DE with a good OLE model was less important than having cool looking visual effects and trendy desktop applets.

Ohh, you need to give Gnome more credit here. I used to be very much a KDE guy and I really didn't like Gnome at all. But that's changed now - I still like KDE (and I look forward to using a more stable and supported KDE 4) but Gnome has come a long way. It's very usable, customizable, and stable.

I've migrated to XFCE-4.1, and in many ways, it feels like KDE used to feel

Ah, yes, the good old days of KDE, back when it had exactly five options that could be configured, and the only way to modify the menu was by hacking an XML file.

Funnily enough I recently made the reverse migration. Xfce served me well for a while, but every single recent version has replaced something that worked fine with a rewritten version that has fewer features and/or simply doesn't work properly at all. KDE meanwhile is very pleasant to use, runs perfectly fast even on my underpowered netbook, and is the only mainstream Linux desktop environment that actually bothers to support widescreen monitors properly by implementing usable vertical panels.

All the above comments aside, it sounds to me like linux *did* work in this troll's example. The part they didn't like was that they believed they had to give away all their work "for free", which while probably true, doesn't mean "linux" didn't work, as it clearly did. The troll even mentions (s)he (and/or their company) was pleased with how it worked, and had planned to expand its usage.

Really, troll -- if you're going to spit this crap unto the comment system, at least come up with something that makes